Tag: Portsmouth

Football has a cruel way of heaping cruel irony upon cruel irony. Just two days ago, Supporters Direct hosted an event at the Houses of Parliament to lobby for the recommendations of the Select Committee for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) into football governance to be fully realised. This followed the publication of the second report of the Select Committee, which, following absolute inertia from the game’s governing bodies following publication of the first report last year, warned all concerned that, “unless there has been clear progress in all the areas we highlight below within 12 months, the Government introduce legislation as soon as practicable.” Over seventy MPs, covering each of the three main political parties, attended the event, with many members commenting publicly on the importance of this report being seen to its logical conclusion. Exactly why this so urgent could not have been thrown into a clearer light than the goings-on at Portsmouth Football Club today. Last night, it began to emerge that another consortium was bidding against the Portsmouth Supporters Trust (PST) for ownership of the club, and it is a consortium the constitution of which is almost shameless in its capacity to raises the eyebrows of anybody that knows much about the recent history of Portsmouth Football Club. Leading the consortium was Keith Harris, possibly best known in the public domain as...

Portsmouth Football Club has had a pretty rough time of things over the last three or four years or so, but today we continue our series of archive videos of the clubs of Football League One with the Fratton Park club, and six videos from the history of a club which has won both the FA Cup and the English championship on two occasions. We kick off with two matches from the years before the outbreak of the Second World War, an FA Cup semi-final against Leicester City from 1934 and the 1939 FA Cup final against Wolverhampton Wanderers. The club’s most successful years came in the immediate post war period, winning the Football League championship in 1949 and 1950. Years of decline followed, and our third match is a complete episode of Match Of The Day from February 1967 featuring Portsmouth play Wolves at Fratton Park. Our next video is a compilation – which cuts out just before the end, but there we go – of the club’s matches from the years between 1982 and 1992, and we follow this with a quite extraordinary trip to The Manor Ground to play Oxford United in November 1992. Our final match sees Portsmouth travel north to Elland Road to play Leeds United – then, of course, a Premier League powerhouse – in the Fifth Round of the FA Cup. You...

Below is full text of Pompey blogger Portus-eg’s findings regarding events at Pompey at the time of the sale of the club by Portpin to CSI in June 2011. It makes interesting reading. The blog was first published here: http://portus-eg.blogspot.co.uk/ under the title: Takeover Toils as Pompey Fans’ Blood Boils. Exasperation is the word that currently sums up the feelings of many a Portsmouth fan, following the latest adjournment yesterday of the PKF v Portpin case regarding the valuation of Fratton Park. Over the last ten weeks or so, Pompey haven’t won for seventeen games, PST announced they would be buying Fratton Park outright and the Mayans calendar proved to be as accurate as the Pompey 2013 one. Yet the club’s supporters remain in limbo about the Portsmouth Supporters Trust taking the club over. Why is that? There are some dark mutterings regarding PKF’s handling of the admin, I will leave that aside for now for others to comment on such as the excellent SJ Maskell has done in her latest blog, but there’s one issue outlined in this narrative where exasperated just doesn’t cut it – apoplectic may be more appropriate. Directly below is an extract from PKF’s document lodged at Companies House recording the vote of creditors passing the proposed CVA on the 25th June 2012. This Document is dated the 28th June 2012: There’s nothing extraordinary on this...

The perils of administration. A cautionary tale. Since October 2012 the Pompey Trust’s bid business partners have committed £800,000 of their own money to the club. If the Trust bid succeeds they will convert this sum to equity in the club. If the Trust bid fails they lose the lot, some individuals to the tune of six figures. As an article of faith in the Trust bid that is quite something. The bid partners, collectively referred to as the High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI), and some of the members of the Trust presidents’ club, have been keeping PFC running since October by making up the shortfall in the club’s running costs. If the bid fails to get control of the club they stand to lose the lot. They will get nothing back in liquidation and nothing if someone else takes control of the club. The question that many erudite Pompey fans have been asking is; ‘Why have they had to do it?’ Indeed, why has the club been running at a loss month to month whilst in administration? The HNWI began subbing the running costs at the end of October 2012, when the Trust became the preferred bidder of the club, after the previous preferred bidders Portpin failed to satisfy the Football League’s questions and were deemed ‘unlikely’ to pass the Owners and Directors’ Test. Since then the HNWI...

Thursday 15 November 2012. Mark the date. On this day Pompey’s administrators PKF announced they had reached a conditional agreement to sell the club to the Pompey Supporters Trust. The completed deal will be unique in English football. Its success will be a landmark victory for fan power, an endorsement of the supporters trust movement and a direct challenge to those responsible for the ills of modern football. It has been a hard won battle. A year ago, the collapse of Bank Snoras and subsequent warrant for the arrest of Pompey owner Vladimir Antonov for fraud set off a chain of events that ended with Pompey in administration and back in the control of Portpin. Portpin who had already put the club in administration in 2010. Reporting these events on 200% at the time I said, ‘This is our club and there is a ‘diabolical collection of demons’ determined to make that clear to anyone who threatens its existence.’ The ‘diabolical demons’ are now one step away from winning the day. The Trust has issued its community share prospectus which gives greater detail of the bid, calling in the 2,000 £1000 pledges made already by fans and opening the offer to any one who cares to contribute more. Fans can pledge as individuals or syndicates, the current number of pledges representing a far larger number of fans than 2,000 as many clubs,...